Well this is an odd thread, and I also didn't know where to put it. It didn't really belong in sales. But anyway. And probably nobody cares. But I thought it interesting. I work at a distribution center for a.."major chain" . Services like 75 stores. I cant get any sales data though. But one interesting thing I can do is, once in a blue moon I'll look up our cost on certain items, aka what we pay for it. In the past it's always the case that when I look them up, game consoles cost a few bucks less than the price. For example last time I checked the 360 premium, back when it was 399 MSRP, our cost was $382. That's typical. The 80 GB PS3 is $582. The 60GB PS3 is $485. The PS2 is $122. I might be getting the 5's and 2's mixed up, but it's basically like that. We do make a couple bucks on systems but it's trivial amount compared to the price. I'll give an example from the other end, I once looked up a 499 LCD TV and our cost was like $382. But anyway I looked up Elite tonight in the system..we actually pay $456 for it (449 MSRP). Especially considering the massive quantity our chain must order. Weird. I would never think we would actually sell something we LOSE money on. I dont know why this is the case for the Elite but I've never seen it be the case for any other system including the premium 360. Here's another weird thing, I noticed pallets of 60 GB PS3's, 80GB PS3's, and Elite 360's in our racks. But there were no premium 360's anywhere! Just and only Elites. I dont know what to make of that, if anything at all. There's really no telling what it means. It could mean Premium's are sold out. It could mean they go through another part of the warehouse (though I'd find that odd). It could mean I just looked on a odd day. Who knows, but I thought it was weird. Oh and, if you're worried about 60GB PS3 stock, we appear to have plenty in reserve.

That isn't too odd really. When I look at the consoles in the system most of them have a -% mark-up, meaning we lose a a small percentage of money on each sale. Often it is less than 4%. There are some consoles that still have positive mark-ups. The Wii for one, has a 2% aprrox. mark-up, which is perhaps why my chain likes to hoard a supply of them and then dump them in a day. It's great for the profit for the day, and week. It could be far worse, Far Cry: Vengance has a -101% mark-up in our computer system, meaning we lose a crap ton trying to get those things off of our shelves. Most consoles have a small positive or negative mark-up. Typically, a game has about an approx. 19% mark-up so we make more money on them, but we need to sell the systems so people are able to play the games.

Maybe the Falcons are coming??

So Sony still makes $7 off each PS2 sold and they make a profit off the PS3 80GB with game? since they sell it to stores for $485. That means up to $17 profit each sold and $1 and up for the store. Interesting.

No not really SSJ12. The PS2 doesn't cost Sony $122 to make. They just sell it to retailers for that much. It probably cost them $100 or less to make the PS2. Same thing with the PS3, except it costs Sony more to manufacture PS3's than they are charging retailers. Also if this is true, MS is screwing retailers big time on the Elite. 

The benefit of stocking consoles despite a negative markup is that customers are more likely keep returning to the store for games.

It also is an easy way of "price fixing": no shop will want to sell below the RRP because they would lose more money on each sale, but not above or they would lose buyers.

And yes, it costs at least $700 to manufacture a 80GB PS3 for Sony now, so they are losing a massive amount of money on each one produced, but if they don't sell well they'll never make back that money from game sales.

Actually somebody pointed out a few days ago , that the manufacturing cost for a PS3 is only 649 dollars :)

Does anyone have a reliable source on how the PS3 suddenly got 1/3 cheaper to build?

Maybe it didn't?

Manufacturers can charge whatever they want to a retailer, regardless if its making them or losing them money.

More than likely, (imo), Sony is offering the PS3s at a profit to retailers so they'll still stock the slow moving things.

Either way, it IS odd that they'd take a $6 hit per Elite. I wonder if Prems are sold out? That'd be great news for MS if true.

 Sony makes $7 profit off ever PS2, thats officially known. They dont make $100+ off of them, if they did they would have dropped the price down to $50 by now.